This website uses cookies

This website uses cookies to give you the best user experience. You have disabled cookies which will render many features of the GSL website unusable. To change your cookie settings, select the option below and follow the instructions. These instructions are also obtainable from the privacy & cookies link at the bottom of any GSL page.

This website uses cookies to give you the best user experience. If you continue without changing your settings we'll assume you are happy to receive all GSL cookies. To change your cookie settings, select the option below and follow the instructions. These instructions are also obtainable from the privacy & cookies link at the bottom of any GSL page.

The Geological Society offers grades of membership for every stage of your career, from student to retirement. Find out about the benefits of membership, and how we can help you achieve and maintain Chartered status.

Information about the Geological Society’s internationally acclaimed books and journals for authors, editors, librarians and readers. Order publications, find out about the Lyell Collection and read guidelines for preparing a paper or submitting a book proposal.

Information and resources for teachers and students from
primary education onwards; for those making careers choices
after A-levels including undergraduate and further degrees
at university; and for those seeking professional
geosciences training or exploring lifelong learning
opportunities.

News and updates for members of the public and policy makers interested in how the geosciences
interact with society. Find updates about outreach activities, policy related meetings, consultation responses and statements.

Geoscientist is the Fellowship magazine of the Geological Society: with news about science, people, the Society, features, reviews, opinion, letters and forthcoming events. All this, and more, can be found sooner here, in our online version.

The Geological Society of London is the UK national society for geoscience, providing support to over 11,500 members in the UK and overseas. Founded in 1807, we are the oldest geological society in the world.

Paleogene Climate Conundrums

September's Shell London lecture, delivered by Tom Dunkley Jones (Imperial College London) at the Geological Society on 21 September 2011.

The Paleogene period represents two thirds of the time elapsed since the end Cretaceous mass extinction event. Dominated in its early stages by a continuation of late Mesozoic warm climates, the early Paleogene witnessed geologically short-lived transient warming events, or hyperthermals, which have been much studied as potential analogues of current carbon cycle, climate and biotic perturbations. Peak warmth - especially extreme high-latitude warmth - during the early Eocene climatic optimum (~50-52Ma) continues to pose a significant challenge to the climate modelling community, despite recent methodological advances in proxy temperature estimation that has largely resolved the "cool tropics" paradox. Gradual high-latitude and then global cooling through the middle to late Eocene culminated in the geologically rapid growth of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, to around its modern extent, at the Eocene/Oligocene Boundary. This "one-cold pole" glaciated state then persisted to the end of the Paleogene and beyond.

The lecture aims to show how rapid climate events, specifically the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM) - the largest of the Paleogene hyperthermals - and the Eocene/Oligocene transition are expressed in the geological record. Tom Dunkley Jones will present primary sedimentary, palaeontological and geochemical data from these intervals recovered from sections in Tanzania, Spain and from recent ocean drilling in the eastern Equatorial Pacific. This will include a whistle-stop tour of some truly astounding fossil discoveries from the micropalaeontological Lagerstätte of southern Tanzania, the amazing technological capabilities of the newly refurbished ocean drilling vessel the JOIDES Resolution and current attempts to reconcile climate model and proxy data reconstructions of PETM global warming.

Speaker

Tom Dunkley Jones (Imperial College London)

Biography

Tom Dunkley Jones is a Royal Society Dorothy Hodgkin Research Fellow within the Department of Earth Science and Engineering, Imperial College London. Having worked for a number of years as a consultant hydrogeologist, Tom returned to academia, undertaking PhD research at University College London into exceptionally-well preserved coccolithophore algae recovered in Paleogene sediments of coastal Tanzania. Tom has worked on these assemblages to understand the evolution, diversity and ecology of these marine phytoplankton through time and the inter-relationship with wider climatic and oceanographic change.

In 2009 he sailed as a nannofossil palaeontologist on Integrated Ocean Drilling Program Expedition 320 to the eastern Equatorial Pacific and in 2010 was awarded the Geological Society President's Award for gifted young geoscientists.